


parfit gentil knyght

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bespin, Corellia, Feudalism, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Gang Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Jedi Finn, Jedi Rey, Lightsabers, Main Character Is An Antisocial Darksider With Very Strong Feelings About Child Endangerment, PLEASE CHECK THE TAGS, Planet Naboo (Star Wars), Ryloth | Twi'lek, Slavery, Tatooine, The Dark Side of the Force, The First Order, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Violence, Worldbuilding, stormtroopers - Freeform, this has more difficult themes dealt with more explicitly than most of my fic!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 23:09:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14725392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Tamé closes her eyes, and - for the first time in years - listens to the Force without expecting a specific answer.When she opens her eyes she has a name, a face, and a whole lot more questions.Breha. Rey. The little girl with the dark eyes and dark hair abandoned to the Temple, who survived its destruction, who Tamé and Lord Ren defended. Who Lord Ren allowed Tamé to believe had died on Jakku; a brief, gentle mercy killing, before her power and her sweetness could fall into Lord Snoke's tormenting hands. Tamé could no longer sense the girl’s presence in the Force, and it never occurred to her to doubt Lord Ren’s word. Tamé has understood his actions better every day she has lived and served, but the Force is telling her that they never took place.Breha is alive. She must be around ten years old now. And she is alone.***This is a story about defection, not redemption.





	parfit gentil knyght

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [more than kin (and less than kind)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14200398) by [rain_sleet_snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow). 



> This was originally inspired by my fic _more than kin (and less than kind)_ , when brynnmclean said she wanted to know more about Tamé. I speculated about a universe in which she might have seen something that didn't change her mind, but turned her aside.
> 
> NEARLY TWENTY THOUSAND WORDS LATER HERE WE ARE.
> 
> Thanks to Brynn (you terrible enabler), Celeste, skitzofreak and Radi for the help.

The target's name is Minna. She's a zabrak, a spacer by trade, and she was once one of Luke Skywalker's Jedi Knights, before Lord Snoke destroyed the New Jedi Order. It's Tamé's job to kill her.  
  
This should not be difficult. Minna Na'kucian is experienced, wily, and vicious, but Tamé is the strongest duellist the Knights of Ren can boast, her lord's most trusted vassal. She is clever, fierce and she has the advantage of surprise. Na'kucian doesn't know she's here, lying in wait on Bestine 9B. The only person who does is Lord Ren. Not even Tamé's peers have been trusted with this knowledge; Tamé savours the warmth that brings her.  
  
She is Kylo Ren's right hand, watching Minna Na'kucian go about her business in Bestine 9B's crowded port, waiting to strike. There is no-one he can trust like he trusts her - not even, Tamé's treacherous mind whispers, Lord Snoke. Tamé serves him as well as her father's cousin served the brilliant and doomed Queen Amidala. She has never failed him. She will not now.  
  
Tamé trails Na'kucian across Bestine 9B. She watches her daily life over the course of hours and then days. Lord Ren gave her specific instructions and it is not the right moment to strike.  
  
Tamé is waiting for that moment when a child comes up to Na'kucian, begging for food or money. Offering something else in return, perhaps, if Na'kucian won't feed her for free. The child is human, pale, with long brown hair and dark eyes and poverty in her worn, unmended clothes.  
  
Tamé plucks the girl's age from her head. Eleven. Her birthday was only a week ago. If Na'kucian had accepted the offer, Tamé would simply have killed her and taken the punishment. She feeds her rage, revels in it. Lord Ren gave her few parameters, trusting her judgement; perhaps she can spare some time to weed out the law enforcement here, remove the corrupt and the violent that the little beggar so plainly fears.  
  
Tamé asks herself why she cares and receives no answer. Na'kucian is buying the girl a meal at a cantina and giving her a knife, as a present, and a hint or two on how to use it, as another. The girl's only eleven years old.  
  
Why does it matter that she's eleven years old?  
  
That day and the next, Tamé does not step out of the shadows to face Na'kucian. She sleeps where she feels it right, eats when essential. Lord Ren doesn’t contact her. He knows every inch of her loyalty. No other Knight of Ren is trusted with a solo assignment; there is always one to kill the disloyal, and no room for alliances in their rivalry. Tamé needs no support and threatens no treachery.  
  
But there's a question she can't get out of her head, a face she knows and yet can't visualise any more, a reason, something that matters, something that's dear to her. She can't even articulate this question, but it's important.  
  
Tamé shadows Minna Na'kucian, close as the sweep of the zabrak's duster. She watches her drink and haggle and swear and take glitterstims, argue with her captain, load cargo, threaten a customs agent. But Tamé only sees the extra portion of takeaway handed to a child, the spare coins hidden in a young woman's pocket, the phantoms sent to torment a man who only wants to take and hurt, the mindtrick that turns a dealer away from a frightened teenager. She sees those acts of kindness, not all of which use the Light, but all of which serve the abandoned. Especially the children. Minna Na'kucian is kindest to the children.  
  
There's no shortage of urchins on Bestine 9B, and all of them trust the spacer Tamé has been sent here to kill, especially the young girls who are nine ten eleven twelve years old.  
   
That shouldn't matter. Why does it matter? Tamé’s question runs round and round inside her head.  
  
Tamé misses her window of opportunity and Minna Na’kucian leaves Bestine 9B unscathed. Tamé sits in her unobtrusive single-person yacht and stares at her hands.  
  
She has failed Lord Ren and she deserves whatever pain he chooses to inflict on her.  
  
Her question is still unanswered, and it consumes her.  
  
Tamé closes her eyes, and - for the first time in years - listens to the Force without expecting a specific answer.  
  
When she opens her eyes she has a name, a face, and a whole lot more questions.  
  
Breha. Rey. The little girl with the dark eyes and dark hair abandoned to the Temple, who survived its destruction, who Tamé and Lord Ren defended. Who Lord Ren allowed Tamé to believe had died on Jakku; a brief, gentle mercy killing, before her power and her sweetness could fall into Lord Snoke's tormenting hands. Tamé could no longer sense the girl’s presence in the Force, and it never occurred to her to doubt Lord Ren’s word. Tamé has understood his actions better every day she has lived and served, but the Force is telling her that they never took place.  
  
Breha is alive. She must be around ten years old now. And she is alone.  
  
Tamé abandons the ship in the Corellian sector, near an enclave heavily populated with the Alderaanian diaspora, and paints it with old, formal Nubian symbols that mean _one who is lost_. It's an act of sufficient cruelty that she knows her lord will know it for a permanent goodbye, a renunciation of the service she swore until death. Under the terms of the oath that binds them he now has the right to kill her on sight.  
  
And yet, she thinks, the one who is lost is not just her, and her lord will remember that. And as Tamé herself regains memories that have been buried under layers of pain, Tamé is increasingly sure that - while he may kill her for it - he will understand why she acted.  
  
  
Tamé doesn't know where she's going or what she's doing, at first.  
  
A number of people in the seedier parts of Corellia think where she's going is to her grave. Tamé kills them and disposes of them. She uses their clothes and their possessions and their money to craft a persona that is a little less... distinctive. Her Knight's clothes were expensive, her lightsaber visible and obvious, and that simply won't do. She hasn't chosen clothes for herself in her lifetime - dressed as her parents' baby until she was six, and then as a political daughter of Naboo until she was ten, then as a Jedi initiate when it became obvious the extraordinary physical facility wasn't pure luck and athleticism, then as a Knight of Ren - and it's... difficult. The only saving grace is that not much of the clothing she acquires fits her, so it limits her choices.  
  
She doesn't give herself a new name. Her treachery makes that question blessedly simple. The handmaidens of Naboo gave up their names to their queen, and should they betray her, they lost them entirely. Under the terms of the ancient oath she swore, and has now broken, her name is forfeit. It's not as if identity documents matter when she can mind-trick her way through any spaceport, anyway.  
  
But none of that tells her what she must do, or where she must go next.  
  
The woman who once answered to Tamé makes her way along the Corellian Trade Spine, waiting for the answer to come to her. It does, in fits and starts and dreams that torment her, over the course of many long months.  
  
Rey, Breha, Jakku, Death Fields. She isn't sure if she forgot them because her memory could hold them no longer or because her lord told her to.

 

  
Her credits run out; she cheats at sabacc and steals for money and food, and listens, waiting for the Force to tell her something else. She hasn't spent so much time listening in years.  
  
She gets frustrated and angry, and the Darkness wells up in her in a way she once welcomed, but which - now she is purposeless - is just exhausting. She snarls when she takes a free drink from a compassionate cantina girl, but when that same girl is backed into a corner by a couple of males whose intent stains the Force like an oil slick the woman sees a chance to pay for her drink and a chance at the violence she wants. A lightsaber attracts more attention than the woman currently has the energy to deal with, so she takes out a knife.  
  
There isn't a scratch on her when she's done and the owner is pointing a blaster at her.  
  
"Don't waste your time," the woman says, in a voice which is rusty from months of speaking as little as possible: xe pulls the trigger but the blaster doesn't fire, and the woman rolls her eyes. "Don't make me say it twice."  
  
The place stinks of fear. That's enjoyable, so the woman sits back to finish her drink. The stares are irritating, though, so once she's done she leaves.  
  
She almost kills the cantina girl following her on reflex.  
  
"Thank you," the girl says, and her hands are trembling and her eyes are afraid but there's something else too, relief, gratitude, a sick joy that the people who hurt and frightened her are hurt and frightened now. "People like that. They don't stop - they're not afraid of me. And the boss won't - But you - I'll be safe for a while now."  
  
She pushes a package into Tamé's slack, startled hands. The woman can smell it: it's a pie, rich and greasy, and her stomach rumbles in an unsettling show of weakness. She takes it.  
  
The woman stares at the girl, who is - a Twi'lek, young, skin a rich grass green: some part of the woman thinks of the Lake Country.  
  
"Carry a knife," the woman says. "And you may tell them I'll be back."  
  
The girl's smile is uncertain but real. She runs away, and the woman turns and goes.  
  
The memory of the girl's relief keeps resurfacing at odd moments.  
  
_And the boss won't - But you - I'll be safe for a while now._  
  
The woman pays in to a fighting ring, beats the second ring of champions bloody, smiles with reddened teeth and shakes her head as she refuses a match with the leader. She says she's had enough and everyone knows she's lying. She walks away. She does that, now.  
  
There's another green Twi'lek in the press of the crowd, not a girl, not so young, but afraid.  
  
The woman breaks the hand he fears on her way past, far too easily. She's using the Dark to burn capillaries and loose teeth and overstretched muscles back to wholeness, though it’s acid on her skin and always tires her out, and well, while she's here...  
  
They pay her her prize money so she won't come back.  
  
  
Two nights later the woman scents a Knight of Ren sniffing around the broken-down hostel she's using. A lesser one, a recent recruit, not one of the ones who had followed Lord Ren from the first. You can always tell; they learnt everything they know from Lord Ren and Lord Snoke, and they are therefore unbalanced, with her lord's wildness but without his power. The woman is more hurt by that than she likes to admit. Realistically, they are no threat to her, and Lord Ren knows that. It's an insult.  
  
She kills off the insult and moves on. She can't afford to leave the planet yet, not if she wants to eat, and she is wary of attracting official attention. She dyes her hair a filthy blonde, barters for a change of clothes that fit the climate better, and never lets her shields drop. It will have to do until she can find enough money to get off-planet.  
  
The next place she goes, there's a lot of children on the streets, more even than on Bestine 9B. They dart in and out, begging for money, all ages and all species, the oldest just below their early teens. They are often ignored or threatened, the woman notices, and they don't like attention: the police tend to kick them about. She melts into the shadows to watch, simply because if they are afraid of her she won't see anything more.  
  
They do get paid, sometimes, particularly the pretty ones, or the pathetic ones. Especially those who are both. But they are no better fed after profitable days and there is a persistent oppression over their spirits in the Force that raises the woman’s hackles. At night they disappear, which is probably for the best. This is a slum, and - unlike other children the woman sees when she goes wandering, dressed in starched school uniforms or running errands - they evidently do not have either parents or the protection of the community.  
  
She follows one in the evening, slipping silently from shadow to rooftop to balcony, and finds a headquarters on the edges of a better part of town, one where better-dressed adults take the children's money and trinkets, and disburse a pitifully small amount in return. The woman watches and waits, and that's how she learns some of the children's scars are deliberately inflicted.  
  
The woman used to drain off pain and fear as easily as she swam, savouring it and drawing strength from it. This, though -  
  
The roof tiles crack under the woman’s grip as she watches. There are too many of them and too well-armed for her to be sure of ending what she sees cleanly, without giving herself away.  
  
The woman waits until the children are escorted out, blindfolded, by one of their tormentors, one she recognises as the filth who takes their daily earnings. She catches him when he releases the children.  
  
She doesn’t let him scream.  
  
For the next two days the children look first very uncertain and then a little better, and the woman feels an unfamiliar satisfaction, but then they sink under that cloud of murkiness again, and the woman trails them once more.  
  
Of course. They replaced the operative. She should have thought of that.  
  
The woman retires to a cantina in a seething mood, and thinks her way through something cheap calling itself Corellian brandy which is nothing of the sort.  
  
She was never good at strategy. She followed her lord's orders and that was all. But she killed several people who were, and maybe that will do.  
  
Maybe you don't need strategy if you know about fear, and the woman knows all about fear.

 

The next day she bursts the heart of an oversized Duros threatening the oldest of the little beggars. The girl has wide brown eyes and fierce bones, is certainly not purely human, and her jaw is now halfway to the filthy ground.

 

“He’s dead,” the girl says.

 

The woman raises her eyebrows. “Well done.”

 

“The roz will blame me,” the girl says, meaning the local law enforcement – some organics, but mostly droids: R0Z-9 models A through D, depending on the relative poverty of the area. A problem for the woman, who has never been very good with droids, but not an insurmountable one.

 

“They won’t,” the woman says, her voice rusty but assured.

 

“Witnesses,” the girl says.

 

“They saw nothing,” the woman says, staring coolly at the shopkeepers. She isn’t bad at mindtricks, but she’s very, very good at terror. “I want to talk to you.”

 

“Can I stop you?”

 

“No.”

 

The girl’s name - or at least, the one she gives the woman - is Queenie. She is thirteen. She has been on the streets since she was six, cared for until she was ten by a cousin, who was killed in a road accident. Nothing changed. They’d already been in the thrall of the Iliconi Boys.

 

“So you’ve known them for seven years,” the woman says.

 

Queenie nods.

 

“You know all the enforcers.”

 

Queenie nods again.

 

“And some things about the chiefs.” The woman saw Queenie dragged into their presence and kept there while the guards threw scraps to children who weren’t being maimed; if that’s happened more than once, and Queenie is a clever girl, then she knows a thing or two.

 

Queenie nods more slowly. “What do you want to know?”

 

“I want to know what they’re afraid of,” the woman says.

 

Queenie smiles, nastily.

 

A girl after Tamé’s own heart.

 

The woman lavishes three whole weeks on the task of disembowelling this ring - sometimes literally. Queenie brings her a tiny Bith, who squeaks and whispers the old superstitions that the chief of the chiefs holds to, a tall Zygerrian courier whose fur is burnt but whose spirit is not and who knows all the enforcers’ hideouts, and Queenie’s own closest contemporary, a Twi’lek boy trying to fight his way into a muscle position and out of an otherwise inevitable imprisonment in an unlicensed brothel. They give her information, and the woman pays them in food, tricks, skills.

 

She starts small and apparently random. Unlocked doors, missing messages, boiling kettles, running freshers. She lies in the rafters of their meeting place and sinks into Dark meditation, allowing hate and suspicion to stain the air. She pits one enforcer against another and leaves the chief of chiefs and his two closest lieutenants untouched, all while leading the man Queenie says is the most volatile of the enforcers to believe that he is being targeted by one of them. She Force-suggests a Trandoshan on the street into giving her target’s children treats, and breaks into his house to move their toys to one of his safe houses.

 

Then she kills one of the two lieutenants, rips out the throat and and scrapes the walls in blood as if a Trandoshan’s claws did it. Blood is important, the little Bith told her. Blood is life.

 

The little Bith drew out symbols of doom for her. She dribbles the least fearsome one onto the floor.

 

Then she goes to the meeting, lies in the rafters, and waits. She gives them fear and paranoia for only ten minutes before two of them get impatient and go to find the missing lieutenant. She steps up her efforts in their absence.

 

When the searchers return, ashen, there’s a nice messy brawl, started by the woman’s target, who turns on one of his own: a Trandoshan of middling importance, hoping to move up in the ranks. The woman watches experimentally. Her target dies, which is fine. The Trandoshan’s situation is more complicated and creates more discontent within the gang, which is also fine. The woman plays with the emotional tone of the room for a while - nothing to it, with this much feeling in the atmosphere - and is perfectly satisfied when the Trandoshan dies too. Some sympathise with him and others don’t. The woman heightens that, hoping for a little homegrown chaos. She leaves the chief of chiefs feeling grim but satisfied: a flaw in the gang scoured out, cleansed.

 

Nobody thinks to suspect the children. The woman strains to ensure they are forgotten - it’s the only thing that’s difficult.

 

Queenie brings her the Twi’lek boy the next day.

 

“Tell me who you are most afraid of,” the woman says.

 

The boy, trembling but honest - Queenie staring him down - gives her the names. The woman teaches him an easy way to dislocate a thumb.

 

“Where did you learn all this,” Queenie says, when the boy’s gone.

 

The woman says nothing.

 

“What are you going to do with us when you’re done?”

 

The woman shrugs. “What would you like to do?”

 

There’s a long silence, and then Queenie says: “I want to go to school.” She swallows. “The orphanages aren’t great. But they’re better than this.”

 

“I’ll get you there,” the woman says. Records will be a problem; so will image. The roz tend to send children like Queenie to juvenile prison, not to the orphanages. They only ever pick them up when they’ve stolen or assaulted or trespassed.

 

But none of that is insurmountable, any more than the roz are themselves.

 

Queenie draws herself up and nods.

 

The Twi’lek boy gave her a list. The woman works her way down it in reverse alphabetical order: one per night. Stopped hearts and blood dribbled over their throats in a single line, the second symbol of doom the Bith gave her painted on the doors.

 

The enforcers cut their meetings with the children short, taking their money and sending them away instead of toying with them. The woman slips a chip containing a song the little Bith described for her into the household droids of each of the chief of chief’s favourite killers. (The Twi’lek boy hides the little Bith, just in case, in return for learning how to hamstring without cutting the artery.) She gives them a few days of peace, then she paints the third symbol of doom on the chief of chiefs’ living room floor.

 

He sends his wives and children into the country, which is smart of him, because The woman doesn’t consider them part of her remit. The wives are stupid, which is a solid survival tactic. The children are babies, and kept ignorant, too.

 

“I want to be with you when you kill him,” Queenie says. The gang is in total disarray and the chief of chiefs has moved to a safe house and surrounded himself with protection.

 

“No,” the woman says. “Don’t ask me twice.”

 

She fries the droids with a little lightning and knocks the guards out with sleeping pills. It’s simple, with the Zygerrian courier’s help and the money the woman has taken from each of her direct kills, and uses less energy than doing the same thing with the Force. It’s also less lethal, which is a consideration. The woman wants the guards alive to tell the tale.

 

She lets herself into the chief of chief’s bedroom. He wakes.

 

The woman lets him get one good scream in, and smiles, just to let him know there’s nobody left to hear.

 

Half an hour later, she closes the bedroom door behind her. The most useful thing the little Bith gave her is written across the floor behind her in blood.

 

Most Bith from Cathynia - the planet of origin for both Tamé’s little informant and the defunct chief of chiefs - do homage to the deity Karolei. Karolei is a deity of death, but one with a special care for children, that eases and avenges their deaths. Sentences for crimes affecting children are handed down in the name of Karolei. It is this legal formula which is currently sinking into an expensive carpet.

 

KAROLEI IS HERE. JUSTICE HAS BEEN DONE.

 

The chief of chiefs isn’t the only Bith leader of a gang on this planet. Hopefully that will keep eyes far away from any other potential culprits, like a scarred human drifter who gives no name.

 

She washes her hands, using the Force to turn the spigot. She helps herself to all the stashes of credit chips and small valuables hidden around the house, but leaves the safe alone. Best not to get greedy. She has enough to get herself off-planet, and plenty to tie up her last loose ends.

 

Queenie has gathered the children where the woman told her to. They are all there. They are also clean and dressed in good second-hand clothes.

 

“It’s done,” the woman says. The little Bith gives a whispery chuckle; the Zygerrian nods seriously. The Twi’lek boy looks torn between joy and fear. The rest have settled firmly on fear, except for Queenie, who looks determined. “Now we need to get you all out of this city.”

 

That causes some protest. The woman makes it clear it’s non-negotiable. More of them look more afraid after that.

 

Most she gives money for food and puts on hovertrains to different cities, to give themselves up to state orphanages. If they choose not to do so it’s not her problem, but it is what Queenie has judged best and Queenie is their leader. The Zygerrian courier has already said she wants to be a spacer and she wants to study. The woman gives her the fare to the nearest big spaceport and enough credits for a correspondence course - the Zygerrian protests it won’t be enough, and Queenie asks sharply if she thinks the Judge doesn’t know about her little purse of extras. The woman raises an eyebrow at both Queenie’s name for her and the Zygerrian’s cheek. She hears neither again.

 

The little Bith, Queenie, and the Twi’lek are in the most danger, and are in the best position to inform on her - no pre-existing rap sheets and too much knowledge. The woman escorts them herself, sometimes from a distance, using short hops to nearby planets. The Twi’lek boy she leaves at an orphanage in the city that also houses the Corellian Federation’s biggest military academy. She still doesn’t know his name, which is not her idea of a problem.

 

“You’re strong and mean,” she tells him. “You’re also smart. You could smash gangs like the one that trapped you.”

 

“The roz don’t take people like me,” the Twi’lek mutters. He’s less afraid of her than he was. “They have droids for dirty work, they only recruit officers from organics.”

 

“Well, you have another option, with skills like yours.” The woman nods at a group of cadets crossing the square. “Just be smart. Save fighting for work. Keep it out of your house.”

 

“Or I’ll end up like you?” the Twi’lek asks.

 

For a dizzying moment the woman is thinking of a children’s dorm at the Temple collapsing in flames, and a tiny human figure crawling from the wreckage. She takes a deep breath, and puts her anger somewhere it will be useful later, without thinking about the regretful edge it has taken on.

 

“You’d have to do a lot to end up like me,” the woman says. “But that would be the start.”

 

The Twi’lek salutes her when he leaves. He also draws a sign against evil. Since it’s the reverse of one of the doom signs the woman splattered around, she suspects the little Bith of having taught it to him.

 

The woman shrugs and makes her way back to her last two fledglings.

 

She only takes them a little further, to the next moon, and she keeps them together. Queenie will look after the little Bith the way she keeps trying to look after the woman. This moon has a reputation for a good educational system, and that’s probably why the woman chose it.

 

“What you called me,” she says to Queenie, before she lets them go. “The Judge.”

 

“Would you have liked the Executioner better?” Queenie asks. The woman feels something unfamiliar but not uncomfortable bubbling in her chest; the girl’s just too quick.

 

She doesn’t respond.

 

“I want a new name,” Queenie says. “Chilei’s going to be Leia. It has the same sound in it. And also, you know, the general. It’s a common name.”

 

The woman nods and hides the way she feels like she’s been punched in the gut. It is a common name, especially in the Corellian Federation. Leia Organa married one of their own.

 

“Choose one for me,” Queenie says. “I picked one for you.”

 

The woman has already explained to Queenie several times over the last month that she has no name. Queenie is a stubborn and reprehensible little monster, but since she will no longer be part of the woman’s life in ten minutes’ time, The woman lets it slide.

 

There’s only one fierce queen for a daughter of the Naboo. The woman forfeited that tie along with honour, name and status when she abandoned Kylo Ren, but she’s allowed to remember.

 

“Padmé,” the woman says, and there’s a certain weight to the word that surprises her.

 

Queenie looks confused.

 

“A queen of Naboo,” the woman says. “She fought for her throne and gave no quarter.” She tugs at the scarf over her head. “Tell them one of your parents was born in the Nubian refugee camps.”

 

Queenie nods. “I can fit that into my story.”

 

Of course she has a story. The woman is pleased and unsurprised.

 

She watches - to make sure they are accepted, to make sure they are not questioned too fiercely, to make sure they do not describe her. Neither of them does.

 

The woman moves on, despite a reluctance that - as an obvious weakness - irritates her. She distracts herself from an idle contemplation of what it would be like to stay and watch over Queenie and the Bith by sharpening her claws on a drug dealer at the hovertrain station.

 

The drug dealer is stupid enough to think the woman is a buyer, or can at least be bought off. The woman disabuses her of this pleasant notion and leaves her with a piss-wet skirt and the conviction that selling to kids isn’t worth the trouble. It improves the woman’s mood almost as much as the kill she makes two days later - quite impulsive considering the last two months of considered work: a roz officer who’s thinking too loudly about the price for pretending an unlicensed brothel doesn’t exist, and who has an unexplained heart attack the next night and dies still sleeping. The woman is darkly entertained to learn she’s spoiled a bounty: maybe the hunters can play tag with Ren’s shadows.

 

The woman hops across to the next planet and almost comes face to face with one of her lord’s Knights. At least this time it’s one of her contemporaries, not a pathetic insult - but The woman was her lord’s right hand and his only trusted vassal, and she has killed several of her contemporaries, so while he’s a threat, he’s not the threat he _could_ be. He’s also alone, to the woman’s surprise, with no fellow Knight escorting him, only a couple of the First Order minions, who don’t concern her.  She is not as good at shielding as she is with a lightsaber, but she’s good enough to hide from him in a crowded spaceport and disappear onto the next ship before he senses her.

 

Still. Best to move fast.

 

At the next cantina she enters, belly full of unidentified meat kebab and eyes sharp, she lets slip to the bartender that she’s looking for work.

 

“Merc,” the bartender sums up, inaccurately but acceptably. “You got limits?”

 

The woman shrugs. She’s hired by the end of the night, and on a ship towards Nal Hutta the following morning. It’s out of her way, but her priority must be to lose her tail; if Breha has survived this long without her she will survive a few additional months, and the woman has no desire to help her lord understand what she is trying to do, or cause him to send a fast yacht directly to Jakku before the woman can reach Breha. She is not sure he would stop Snoke training Breha into a weapon; he is less Ben Organa than he was.

 

It takes two day cycles on the cavernous ship for the woman to discover that she has both additional priorities and limits. She has no problem with being called Scars when she refuses to give a name, she has seen worse than the uncomfortable bunks and bland space food, and after years of fighting off posturing from other Knights of Ren, she is somewhat above the crew’s internal politics. But the ship is transporting slaves, and that the woman objects to. It turns out that some of the phrases they used in hiring her were code words the woman did not recognise, but a real mercenary in her position would have known. She curses herself for not knowing the Outer Rim better for another day cycle.

 

That regret evaporates when she discovers there are children onboard. The boss prides himself loudly in her presence on never buying product below the age of thirteen. A waste, he says. You want them mostly adult but still pliable.

 

The woman stares at the children - several species, all on the verge of puberty or just past it, all separated from the adults by only a corridor, so they can see and fear - and stares at him, with an impassivity that he takes for acceptance. He is stupid enough to consider her trustworthy because she signed a contract. He doesn’t care that she did not tell him her name in her own voice and swore no spoken oath. He has no Nubian crew to tell him that matters.

 

Not long afterwards, the woman takes a vibroblade off a fellow merc who was about to use it on a Gungan, who may have thirteen standard years but is still a young child by his species’ standards. “Don’t mark the product,” she says, flat and rusty, the first words she’s spoken in several days.

 

“Boss won’t mind,” the merc says, a smirk twitching at a mouth uncovered by his heavy wrappings.

 

The woman looks at him. “You sure?”

 

He isn’t. “Give me the blade back, Scars,” he wheedles. “Come on. I only wanted a bit of fun.”

 

“Not now.”

 

The woman pockets the blade. When she’s gone, she clears her throat and turns the gurgling of the phlegm to account.

 

“Ask friends... if... to fight,” she says, in very, very bad Gungan. She learnt a basic level along with every child her age, when the King was trying to improve Gungan and Nubian relations. She’s surprised it isn’t totally gone.

 

The Gungan says something she doesn’t understand. Then he clearly realises she doesn’t understand, and nods instead. She hands him the vibroblade. If he’s caught with it she’ll force the idiot with the wrappings to confess to dropping it and make sure the Gungan dies before they hurt him.

 

“Don’t let me catch you misbehaving again,” she snarls, with a significant look at the vibroblade. It disappears.

 

Then she stands and looks over at the nearby adults, who are staring. One is making a small moaning noise, but it almost sounds hopeful, which will attract attention. She whacks the bars with a cane, and sees them flinch back. “And you,” she snaps. “Enough noise out of you.”

 

There’s a Togruta woman with wide green eyes near the front. Predator’s eyes. And when she smiles, she has predator’s teeth.

 

Excellent: at least one of them understood her.

 

The woman doesn’t speak for the next thirty-six standard hours, even when she learns the Gungan’s name is Rass and the Togruta is passing messages among the slave pens in code she must have learnt from some rebel grandparent. Planning a slave revolt requires all the woman’s concentration. Passing as normal, if disturbing, demands her silence.

 

The revolt, when it comes, is brief. It’s also bloodier than the woman intended. She meant to kill as many of her fellow crew as couldn’t be coerced into joining them, but if their plans had fallen out as intended there would not have been quite so many dead bodies. They reached Hutt Space before her plans reached their ideal point, and every light year further into Hutt Space is another link in the slaves’ chains, so they had to act when they weren’t quite ready. The woman springs the trap, lets anger overtake her as the first of the slaves fall, and kills indiscriminately until the only crew member left standing is the navigator - and they’re only left because Rass is standing in front of them.

 

“Wesa need them,” Rass says, in the lilting Basic the woman remembers from her childhood. “Alive is _useful_.”

 

The woman powers down her lightsaber.

 

“Is yousa Jedi?” Rass says, doubtfully.

 

The woman shakes her head no.

 

There are other crew members still living, just injured - Togruta teethmarks, breaks from strong Twi’lek hands, stun bolts and non-fatal blaster wounds. The woman turns them over to Isko the green-eyed Togruta, resisting the impulse to kill them since they are there, and applies herself to turning the damn ship around.

 

About three hours in, when the ship is going in the right direction and the woman is making plans to skip out before Judicial arrives, Isko appears a discreet distance from her shoulder, and announces herself with a whistled skirl that sounds ominous.

 

The woman looks at her.

 

“It’s what the Togruta have been calling you,” Isko says. Her accent is raw Outer Rim with a breathy note the woman doesn’t recognise, and she’s far more brazen than Queenie was, and far less careful; she reminds the woman of a sunny-eyed boy killed by a Knight of Ren while his dormitory burned behind him. “It means Plains Fire. Fucks everything up and brings new life.”

 

The woman digests this.

 

“You shouldn’t have used the Force so much,” Isko reproves her. “Now half of us think you’re a demon and the other half think you’re a priest. Come and look imposing while the Eldest says some words over our dead.”

 

The woman doesn’t even try to digest this. She just does what Isko asks of her. And when Isko comes to her in the night cycle, shaking with reaction, she doesn’t turn her away. Isko is a leader, like Lord Ren was. Lord Ren would have scorned turning to anyone for comfort, but he would always let her guard him, when he was healing. It stands to reason that Isko needs the same.

 

“Nothing will hurt you,” she rasps.

 

“The children,” Isko stutters, with a shrill whistle of distress the woman can barely hear. “I can’t protect the children.”

 

“No,” the woman croaks. “But I can.”

 

Isko laughs harshly, and lets out the sequence of noises that make up the words Plains Fire. Some time later she falls asleep.

 

The woman lies awake, thinking about how she’s going to get out of this.

 

Isko wants her to make her departure dramatic. Isko enjoys dramatics and ceremony. She used to be a storyteller, apparently, which explains why even the humans are whistling her label for the woman. She isn’t a bit sorry, either.

 

The woman could kill her, but at this point it would be a waste.

 

She lets Isko win the argument and insists that her flashy exit be easy to repeat; they’re picking up a lot of comm chatter that suggests there are already rumours of a terrible massacre, and, well. The woman’s eyes linger on the children, who are all afraid of her, and thinks that it would be nice if the slavers were as scared. Fewer cargoes, maybe. Lost profits. Live children.

 

She needs to get back towards Jakku, which, from here, probably means retracing her steps to the Corellian Trade Spine. Maybe she can make a few more flashy exits while she’s at it.

 

In the end, she and Isko settle on the combination of a modified flashbang and some kind of dried herb that grows on Shili and other similar planets, and which smells like the sun when it smokes. Accordingly, Plains Fire disappears from the ship two full cycles before it makes landfall, in a flash and a smell and the sound of several hundred people panickily trying to turn off the fire alarm, and the woman wastes her time trying to meditate in an extremely cramped hiding place.

 

Before they make landfall and disappear from each other’s lives, Isko brings her food and several parting gifts: Rass’s vibroblade, a string of beads, a water canteen, the best of the slavers’ blasters, a kiss.

 

The woman doesn’t strike.

 

She remembers what it was like, before the Knights of Ren, to look at someone and see a person she wanted to love, a person who made her heart beat faster, who brought a silly smile to her face, long before she stopped smiling at all. She remembers Oless who’d loved Mirith, neither of whom had survived for long as a Knight. She remembers the rain of the waters and boys from home who were all a little awed by a Jedi, games with girls who laughed and awarded kisses as prizes.

 

It’s dark and she feels stiff and this is strange; but Isko let the woman see what she wanted to do, and the woman followed her instincts and leaned in, not back.

 

“Why did you do that?” she asks. She has spoken aloud to no-one but Isko since the revolt, and maybe that means something.

 

“I wanted to say I kissed the fire,” Isko says. “All our daredevils do it. Run with the flames as they reach your heels.” There’s a wildness in her eyes the woman sees without understanding. Isko clasps her hand, so tightly it almost hurts. “It means you survive. You accept the fire’s first gifts - the prey that runs ahead of it - and you live to see the second - the new life that comes next. The fire kisses you if you get burned, or if you’re too slow, or you fall and don’t get up.”

 

The woman nods. Then she leans forward and presses her mouth to Isko’s. Isko’s teeth are sharp.

 

“The fire kissed you back,” she says. “And you survived.”

 

Isko’s wide eyes suddenly brighten, and she runs a hand under her nose. “Don’t tell me things that are beautiful and apt,” she scolds. “Not when you’re going away to waste yourself wandering. The gods fucked up when they made you a merc.”

 

They made me a knight, the woman thinks, and I broke what they gave me.

 

 

The woman stays just long enough to make sure the freed slaves are treated as refugees rather than a business opportunity. She gets close enough to listen in on some of the questioning, and hear a legend form. The survivors have invented a party line and stuck to it. Rass, who knows good and well that a human speaking execrable Gungan has nothing to do with a legend from Shili, is particularly vociferous.

 

The woman takes work on the next ship back towards the Spine. This time all she has to do is guard vats of illicit low-quality bacta. There are no bodies, slaves, or murders. Just some pathetic false advertising.

 

Soothing.

 

The woman carries on like that for years.

 

She keeps trying to work her way towards Jakku. But not much goes to Jakku, and not much comes from Jakku, and she can’t afford a ship or special passage and is unlikely to save enough to buy either, especially considering she’d need to pay for Breha on the return. She can’t steal a ship, either. For a quick jaunt, it would be fine (and is fine, several times - the woman steals without worrying overmuch about it, when she needs to) but an extended trip is another matter, especially an extended trip with a young girl the woman needs to protect. The woman isn’t a good slicer and she can’t forge. She can’t risk Breha reaching official notice too soon; it’s a short step from that to the First Order’s ears, and the woman’s own hearing is sharp enough that she knows those ears are increasingly pervasive. Their power in the galaxy is growing, and the woman must reach Breha before they do - if she doesn’t, Ben’s abandonment of the girl and the woman’s own years of searching will be wasted. If she does reach Breha, and attracts too much attention, the outcome will be the same.

 

The woman has to do this right, and that means finding a way to work passage to Jakku, get Breha hired on alongside her or pay for her passage, and then leave and think of what to do with the girl once she’s off the damned dustball.

 

Sometimes, in her darker moments, when she’s farther from Jakku or any hope of retrieving Breha than she would ever have believed possible, the woman fears that Breha’s dead. In those terrible hours the woman finds sufficient privacy however she can and meditates. The Force does not answer her easily or freely, save in strange small moments, but sometimes it answers her in this, and it tells her Breha is not yet lost.

 

The woman keeps going.

 

She develops a reputation. It includes reliability, a love for solitude, the capacity for brutality, and a distaste for speech. She manages to keep it unconnected to any stories that might have been arisen from (say) arming slaves, killing a spousebeater, or breaking a blackmailer, for the simple reason that she doesn’t allow any of those people to see her in a way that would allow them to know her again, and changes her appearance regularly - sometimes more voluntarily than other times. She feeds well or she starves, depending. She cuts her hair off, and when it grows again there are heavy bands of grey in it. She dyes it several colours, wears hats, hoods, boots, long skirts, tight trousers; marks her face with false tattoos, finds her scars increasing in number and severity. She remembers caring about her appearance once, but now all that matters is hiding herself from the searchers, who she knows have not yet given up.

 

She has little to fear from the First Order - though their power grows, it is not yet great enough for them to muster the numbers and technology to take her on quickly and easily. She remains… concerned… by the idea that other Knights of Ren may catch up with her. There are few who could pose a real threat to her, given her skills, but if they worked together she would be hard pressed to defeat them, and she no longer has contemporary information on their competencies. And if she were to face her lord, the woman knows she could not fight him.

 

She cannot risk facing him. She has not found Breha yet, and while she fights to reach her, there are other lost children who need someone to come to their aid, and too often, The woman is all there is. Or perhaps it’s just that what there is isn’t fast enough or effective enough, or is corrupt. The blackmailer was a judge’s sister, and the police on Dantooine were afraid to move against her.

 

The woman wasn’t. Sometimes it looks to her as if she’s the only one who isn’t afraid of things like that.

 

Still, better that she should not be caught; better that she should not be identifiable. The woman continues to change her face, and let everyone else change her name. Scars, the Judge, Plains Fire, Scarface, Killer, Silence; The woman is given a thousand different labels by a thousand different people, some of them meaning better than others. Not a lot of people call her by the name on her identification, which is so common it passes without question almost anywhere in the galaxy you can find humans. Few of the spacers’ or the cantina names stick; none of the names given to her by the people she kills for do, because she never sees them again, and there are not so many of them that their stories can be linked. A Nautolan with a gathering film over his wide black eyes, a spacer who can’t bear to set foot on the ground no matter how the artificial air dries out his skin or his vision deteriorates, calls her Flash for the way she moves when he’s about to stumble into a hazard and doesn’t know it. Mit’n dies when their ship is boarded by Kanjiklub, blown out into space by the hull breach, and though it’s probably the best way he could have gone - the depressurisation so rapid he would have had no idea - the woman finds it difficult not to take out her lightsaber and storm through the Kanjiklub ship. But none of the people on board know she has a lightsaber or can use it.

 

The woman settles for killing the entire boarding party and looting their bodies. Kanjiklub trade with the big names, and they have fancy equipment. No good for long-haul space travel, where parts need to be robust, functional and accessible rather than beautiful, but they like to set themselves up as classy. The woman gets the captain to sell the equipment for her and wires the money to a bank on Glee Anselm, where Mit’n’s niece will get it. Too young to sail the stars with him, he’d said, her parents wouldn’t have wanted it. She’s only fifteen.

 

The woman can’t do anything more for her.

 

“That was a good thing to do, Amo,” Colet says, eyeing the woman carefully. Colet’s only been a captain for a year, which is why he can’t afford to be choosy about the crew he hires, and the woman can tell he’s wondering if hiring her was a good idea. Her clothes are still bloodstained.

 

“Call me Flash,” the woman says.

 

“Mit’n called you that, didn’t he?”

 

The woman nods.

 

After that, she uses Flash for as long as she can. It’s not her name: she has no name. But it helps to have a standing label. It makes other people more comfortable, which has not historically been a concern, but is an important thing to consider, when you don’t actively want to frighten people. Colet keeps shuffling her off to the back of the ship when he’s dealing with customers. She can’t blame him: she likes him too much. In any case, she doesn’t want to deal with the people.

 

She stays with Colet’s ship for a year, then leaves. Colet offers her a raise and a promotion, neither of which he can afford, but which make a small, surprised smile twitch at the woman’s face. It’s a shock to learn he cares, though it’s only a shock to her.

 

“I mean it,” Colet assures her, looking hurt.

 

“I know,” The woman says. “I’d stay if I could.” She pauses, wondering how much to tell him. “You’re safer without me.”

 

Colet’s eyes narrow. He wasn’t born yesterday; in fact, he’s ten years older than the woman. “What have you done?”

 

The woman mulls this over. It’s important that she tell him something, and it’s important that whatever she tells him is not the truth; he can’t be allowed to know that she sensed Lord Ren’s presence somewhere not so far away at their last stop and fears that he will have sensed hers, too. She cannot bring her lord down on Colet and his largely innocent crew.

 

“Steer clear of systems with a significant influence from the First Order for a while,” the woman suggests.

 

Colet drops onto the bunk in his captain’s cabin. “Stars, Flash. I don’t mind that one bit, they’re bad for business, but what the fuck did you do?”

 

“Escaped,” the woman says, succinctly. It’s a lie, she reminds herself, and it’s true, part of her whispers, it’s true, it’s a lie -

 

It’s both.

 

Colet lets her go with an excellent reference, a bonus and no contract penalties. In return she helps him choose her successor.

 

She returns to their previous stop immediately and, over the course of two nights, shows herself and her lightsaber in a way that will let rumours percolate through a different town to the one she was in with Colet’s crew. She uses a different label and wears an all-encompassing black cloak. She can’t sense her lord’s presence close by, but that means nothing. Her range for sensing individuals is half a mile at most.

 

The woman leaves as fast as she can after that, but over three nervewracking months she establishes that there is no pursuit, and that Colet and his crew are unmolested, flying highly respectable charters between small planets in the Hosnian system. She doesn’t know why neither she nor Colet have been followed. Perhaps Lord Ren didn’t sense her. She cannot dare to believe that he chose not to pursue her. But she is probably safe, for a given definition of safe.

 

In any case, the woman’s ready money has run out. She takes another job and keeps moving. She shelves her attempts to make it to the Western Reaches for a further nine months, out of an abundance of caution, and sticks to short-term jobs, changed names. She told Colet she would go looking for family, which will explain a break in her work history. She wouldn’t care to ask most of the captains she works for to give her a reference. None of them are good people; having worked for them will say nothing good about her, and decent captains care about that sort of thing. The woman is very bored of finding plausible ways to kill off bad ones, and there’s always someone equally corrupt to take their place.

 

She’s disembarking from the latest unsatisfactory voyage on Ryloth, where she’s never been before - and which she hopes will be her first step back towards Jakku - when the Force grabs her by the throat and screams LISTEN.

 

The woman stops and listens. It’s a mesa city, neither as large nor as elaborate as Lessu, the capital, but sprawling with badly planned new growth and informal settlements; she saw it on the horizon as they landed. The dodgy spaceport they’re in, riddled with criminals and fraudulent officials, is buzzing with life. It’s hot, the stone’s red, and for as far as the woman’s senses can reach she can feel misery, pain, servitude, injustice - but also anger, defiance, stubbornness. Her unseeing eyes track an official’s arm as he delivers a glancing blow to a scrawny teenager.

 

The woman blinks and sees again. A small but important ligament snaps in the official’s arm as he raises it once more for a backhand.

 

“You signing on again, Scarface?” asks the chief of engineering as she walks by, already smelling of ethanol.

 

 “Maybe,” the woman says.

 

The sun is hot. The atmosphere is seething.

 

The woman thinks she might stick around for a while.

 

 

***

 

The woman is not quite as forgotten as she might have hoped.

 

“I think I found a Sith,” Lando says, in the middle of Leia’s holiday on Cloud City, which is meant to be a pleasant break after her dramatic departure from the Senate, since nobody on Cloud City notices anything they are not paid to notice. Han is supposed to be here, but he’s late.

 

He hasn’t been on time since Ben disappeared. Either he’s trying to get to the bottom of the never-ending rumours about the Lost Prince of Alderaan, or he’s trying to avoid Leia. She’s never sure which it is.

 

“You what,” Leia says, setting her cutlery down with precision.

 

“I was going to mention it earlier,” Lando says. “You were too busy delivering a fire and wrath speech to the Senate and sweeping out in a trail of smoke.”

 

“Fuck off,” Leia says. “Tell me about the Sith. I’m no Luke, but -”

 

“None of that, princess,” Lando says. The second fish course is cleared away and replaced with datapads and holograms.

 

The grainy image is not one Leia recognises for several long moments; then, after some squinting, and adjusting for muscle changes, a young adult’s changing body, hard circumstances and a distinct deterioration in the quality of clothing, she identifies her.

 

“One of Luke’s students,” she says. “One whose body we never found. Tamé Zapalo; high-born Nubian girl, one of those ones with parents who call me Leia Naberrie.”

 

“Not more than once,” Lando observes, nibbling. The staff managed to find space for a cheeseboard and platter of fruit on the table before they left.

 

“No,” Leia agrees, “not more than once. Tamé… I don’t remember much about her. She was a friend of Ben’s. Feminine presentation. Exceptional with a lightsaber.” She pauses, and sighs. Lando nudges the fruit her way, but she doesn’t want to eat. “What did she do that makes you think she’s a Sith?”

 

“Well, the lightsaber is a giveaway.”

  
There’s only ten seconds of lousy footage, but a red lightsaber definitely features.

 

“Point conceded,” Leia says. “What has she been doing?”  
  
“Killing people,” Lando says. “Wrecking things.” He pauses in his turn. “Funny. Nobody she’s been killing is what you might call a worthy citizen.”  
  
Leia stares at him. That’s not Lando’s kind of value judgement. “In what sense?”  
  


“Miss Zapalo has been going through the gangs on the Corellian Trade Spine like a knife through butter,” Lando says. “Especially the ones with a reputation for messing with kids.”

 

Leia says nothing for a while.

 

Her voice is rusty when she says: “Were you going to suggest we take it to the Senate?”

 

“Honestly,” Lando says, “no. This was purely -” he waves his fingers - “an informative exercise.”

 

Lando was a street kid in Corellia, once, same as Han was. Different planets, same system, not dissimilar story.

 

“Huh,” Leia says.  


“Fruit?” Lando suggests openly. He thinks she doesn’t eat enough, or that the protein bars and drinks she has snatched between sessions and meetings and long hours of work are nutritionally insufficient.

 

“No, thank you,” Leia says. There’s a nasty taste in her mouth; she swallows convulsively. “I’m not hungry.”

 

She doesn’t sleep for half the night.

 

Whatever Tamé Zapalo is doing, she isn’t doing it on Snoke’s orders: that much is clear. She isn’t of the Light, but she’s _free_.

 

Leia tries to forget. She’s already decided not to interfere with Tamé Zapalo, for the present: there is nothing further to be done. It’s too difficult to think that Ben might be able to free himself from Snoke, and far too painful to hope.

 

***

 

The First Order threatens Ryloth.

 

Well, officially not the First Order: drug cartels. But the woman remembers, still, how the First Order’s higher echelons worked. Kylo Ren had total access, of course, at Snoke’s command, and the woman followed her lord. She doubts that either she or Lord Ren understood the full extent of what was happening, much of it couched in discreet half-sayings sneered from the pursed mouth of Brendol Hux, but she does remember the First Order fuelling proxy wars, to split the New Republic’s firepower and create chaos. Of course, early attempts were flawed. The Mandalorians, for instance, sent back the First Order’s discreet agents in pieces. Chief Commandant Hux had sighed over savages.

 

The proxy war on Ryloth might well work - or at least, it will plunge Ryloth into another generation of conflict. The woman’s a kind of violent secret here, appreciated for what she can do but not nearly exalted or clean enough to go anywhere near any kind of ranking commander, let alone a Syndulla. Still, she can hear them sighing and stirring, the architecture of a Free Ryloth movement being cleared of dustballs and insects for a new generation to inhabit it. The Republic is useless, though the woman hears Leia Organa fulminating about Ryloth’s troubles on the holonet and lobbying for bills in the New Senate, as if that will get anything done. Someone needs to fight back.

 

That someone can’t be the woman. She wants it to be - she can see the toll the first skirmishes are taking on the children and teenagers of Ryloth, and her fingers itch to draw a weapon. But now that the First Order is here, digging its claws into the equatorial jungles where the citizens’ defence systems can’t make themselves omnipresent, the woman has gone from a useful tool to a liability. If they find out the woman’s here and identify her, Snoke and Lord Ren will know within hours.

 

She waits too long, by any measure. There is always something more to do, another raid to take on, another lesson to give. There are many ways she can’t be useful to the defence system she has joined, but there are always slaver squads who need to be pruned, new operatives to be taught dirty tricks, corrupt officials to be frightened; the woman is the deadliest knife in their armoury, one they would prefer not to have to use but use anyway. But the day her fellows’ spies identify a First Order operative in the city, the woman knows she has to leave.

 

Her favourite comrade packs her bag for her. He’s her favourite because he’s reliable, not because he’s happy she’s here.

  
“We knew you wouldn’t be sticking around, Ch’sei.”

 

‘We told you not to stick around’ goes unspoken. Her visibility is excessive - it was getting dangerous even before the First Order set foot on Ryloth. Ch’sei means Death, and it’s not the name the defence system originally gave her. There’s a minor legend attached to it, after a year and a half on Ryloth’s surface. The woman hopes they can take advantage of it for a smokescreen of fear, once she’s gone. Her last useful action for them.

 

Well. Her second-last.

 

“I can help out at the spaceport.”

 

He nods, and gives her a list. It’s well-thought-out and carefully prioritised, the work of months, not hours. They all knew how this would end the moment it started.

 

The woman makes her way to a spaceport, not the one she started at. She works her way through the list of small sabotages, signs up at a work exchange, and sits in a cantina for hours until she gets the job she wants. Officially, she’s been working planet-side security, a dirtborn human wanting to feel some real ground under her toes. She has a nice reference and it isn’t even fake.

 

She takes a job back towards the Western Reaches: security on a cargo trip, stopping at several other planets in the Ryloth system to take on ores and other raw materials, and then heading for Duro on the Corellian Trade Spine, exactly where the woman wants to be. It’s a bloody long way away from Ryloth, a longer haul than the woman has ever tried before, and she only hopes the trip will be boring.

 

For a while it is, and then they hit pirates, somewhere in deep space in the Outer Rim, in the middle of the night. Only the woman is not surprised. The Force has been dancing on her collarbones for the previous three standard hours and her palms are sweating for the want of her lightsaber; she isn’t merely awake, but waiting.

 

They’re pirates after what they can get, which is, first, the ship - because that’s all they know there is - and then the ore - because that’s what the ship has on it - and then the crew and passengers, because in many parts of the galaxy Twi’leks are a commodity, and the sentients on board are mostly Twi’lek. The Nautolan family are worse than nothing, apparently, as their young are hardly more than tadpoles and dependent on all three parents so they’d have to be sold as a bloc. They will therefore be spaced. A number of the guards are dead, which is a pity, as with their skills and physical toughness they could be sold at a reasonable price. The human mercenary who they glimpsed killing several of the boarders is too ugly to be valuable as an attractive female and is probably wounded since they haven’t seen her lately, but maybe the Trandoshans will take her as fodder, or perhaps she’d be a good labourer.

 

The woman is lying in a vent above this cheerful discussion. She can hear her employer desperately trying to bargain, pointing out their insurance, the location - which is somehow unsafe for pirates? These are desperate: the woman doesn’t see that their location matters - and the greater value they possess alive and free. The pirates shoot out one of his kneecaps and menace his daughter, the apprentice navigator. Sixteen standard years old, if that. The woman was teaching her how to hold a knife yesterday, in an attempt to stem some of the Force’s sinister warnings. Maybe if at least one of them could defend themselves a little…

 

Well, obviously not.

 

The woman can hear Koyi sobbing, quiet and desperate, and promising the pirates anything, if she can only care for her father; under Ilar’s harsh cries of pain the woman can sense the panicked bubbling of the terrified Nautolan young. There’s a lot of noise, and the smell of fear is not merely metaphysical.

 

One of the pirates laughs. The woman sinks into her fury, takes hold of her lightsaber, and drops through the ceiling to land directly on at least one pirate.

 

The woman has had plenty of time to work on her skills since her last slave revolt, and battle meditation is one she has had some considerable use for. This time it carries her through several serious wounds and a solid half of the pirate crew. The rest flee, screaming about Sith. The woman doesn’t feel like issuing a theological correction.

  
“ _Ch’sei_!” Koyi screams, waving a large and bloody spanner and attempting to chase them, eyes mad with rage. “ _Ch’sei aj circaa_! _Utulka eswo_ , you karking bastards, turn and fight-!”

 

The woman takes her firmly by the back of the shirt before she can run off the ship into the pirates’ ship, in an attempt to take vengeance. She nods at Firith and Filyns, red-skinned twins five or six years older than Koyi who are trying to secure the sector, and drags Koyi back so that the twins can seal the sector off before the pirates disengage their boarding gear. Some of the ore will be lost in transit, and they’ll need help to dock on Duro, but Ilar can claim on insurance. And they have their lives, which is the key thing.

 

“Let me go!” Koyi roars. “Let me go!”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” the woman says, in bad Ryl. “You can’t get to them now. They’re gone.”

 

“They’re gone?” Koyi says, in her pretty, classy Lessu-inflected accent, little warrior’s voice wobbling. The woman feels vaguely apprehensive about that - more so when Koyi pauses and asks her to promise.

 

“I promise,” the woman says. The pirates _might_ be back, of course, but in Tamé’s experience no-one who runs away from her shrieking about a Sith is likely to return.

 

Koyi shudders and staggers and puts a hand out to rest against the wall. “Good,” she says. “Good.”

 

A few moments later, she bursts into tears.

 

The woman stands there motionless and uncertain. After a few moments she realises she’s swaying, and that the corridor around her is out of focus. She touches a tacky patch on her back, and regards the blood on her hand with more irritation than concern.

 

“You’re hurt, Haly,” says Firith, approaching the woman with extreme caution as his sister kneels by Koyi, stroking her shoulder and talking to her softly.

 

The woman barely recognises the label she gave when she joined Ilar’s crew. Haly: visitor. She looks at Firith, and nods. At least, her head twitches.

 

“I want to help you,” Firith says, slow and careful. “Please put the lightsaber down first.”

 

The woman turns it off, and - after a moment’s dizzy thought - tosses it into Koyi’s lap. It’s not a secret now, and the girl’s a safe pair of hands. She’s also a weak pair of hands the woman can retrieve the saber from, whenever necessary.

 

“They won’t come back,” the woman says. All the Ryl she ever spoke has now deserted her, so she says it in Basic. “But if anything does, you can kill it with that.”

 

Koyi takes it in her hand, wondering.

 

“Other way up,” the woman manages to tell Koyi, sternly, before she faints.

 

 

When she wakes up, it’s in a hospital bed in the ship’s small sickbay. There is a hoverchair next to her bed being occupied by Ilar, its foot raised to protect Ilar’s ruined knee. He is turning her saber over and over in his hands like he understands it. The door is guarded.

 

“If I’d known you were Lalesk I would not have hired you,” Ilar says.

 

It takes the woman’s fuzzy brain a few moments to identify the word, but it’s one that has often been thrown at her, so she gets there in the end. _Lalesk_ : Sith, evil, demon.

 

“I’m not,” the woman says. “Not any more.”

 

Ilar looks at her as if this means nothing. Ryloth’s culture relies heavily on an extremely durable tradition of oral history and every Rylothi Twi’lek the woman has ever met can recall clan ties, grudges, and debts in excruciating detail, so it probably does mean nothing to him. History is everything.

 

“If I were,” the woman says, “I wouldn’t have freed your crew.”

 

His hands still. “What are you, then?”

 

“A traveller,” the woman says. “A survivor.” Her throat hurts: Ilar gives her a little water and she rasps out her thanks.

 

“Where did you come from?”

 

“Nowhere,” the woman says. She broke faith. A traitor has no home.

 

“Where did you learn to use this thing?” Ilar waves the lightsaber, blessedly without turning it on, as he - like his daughter - is holding it upside down.

 

“Many places,” the woman says, which is true. She clears her throat. It doesn’t help much. “I have no right to a history.”

  
There is a long silence.

 

“No right,” Ilar mutters, sounding equal parts unimpressed and annoyed. “Kills slavers, and says she has no right to a history. Ha. No right to what? Truth is truth. You cannot kill it or burn it.”

 

“You can disown it.” The woman sinks back into her bed; all her bones are aching. “I broke a vow. I gave up everything.”

 

“Except your lightsaber,” Ilar points out.

 

The woman nods, which was a terrible idea.

 

“What did you break your vow for?” Ilar demands, and that’s the million-credit question, the question the woman spent months asking herself on Bestine 9B seven years ago, the question she has only one answer to.

 

“There’s this girl,” The woman says. “I need to find her before the Lalesk do.”  
  
“Or what?”

 

“Or they’ll make her one of them,” The woman says. A deep breath sets several broken ribs to shrieking. Why don’t they have more bacta onboard? Or are they now so afraid of Haly that they’ll do anything to try to keep her under restraint, including fail to provide medical treatment? “Like I used to be, only… worse.”  
  
“How is that possible?” Ilar says, incredulous. Apparently, her falling from the ceiling and creating total carnage directly in front of him left an impression.

 

“I have… very little power,” the woman says. “Relatively speaking. I can fight and kill those around me. Not much more. Think of me as… a small, dim star. This girl, if she’s still alive, she’s… unparalleled. As far beyond me as I am beyond a comet.” She closes her eyes and swallows down untraceable nausea. “They would make her into a supernova. I can’t… let that happen.”

 

She tries to pull on some Force healing, just to make sure she won’t die too soon, but the effort is too much. It slides out of her grasp and whiplashes to cut her on the way, razor-sharp, and she hisses at the pain.

 

Ilar is silent for several long moments.

 

“Let me guess,” he says. “This girl. She’s about sixteen.”

 

The woman nods, very slightly. Breha would be seventeen by now, nearly eighteen. But he’s not far off.

 

“Ryma’at help us all,” Ilar sighs, at last. “I am making a terrible mistake. If you kill us all in our beds my husband will murder me.”

 

The woman cannot parse this. She slides back into unconsciousness as Ilar leaves the lightsaber in her lap.

 

 

She opens her eyes to strong Outer Rim accents, not Rylothi at all, and Firith holding her wrist down. Filyns is on her other side. The woman stirs, gathering herself for action. Her lightsaber is no longer touching her, but she can sense it, close by.

 

“This is Nima,” Firith says, voice clearly meant for the woman as well as whoever he’s ostensibly talking to. “She took some serious injuries defending us, and we don’t have the equipment to fix her up. Besides, our stuff is optimised for Twi’leks.”

 

“Nima, can you hear me?” Filyns says, bending over her. “The Tatooine System Defence have picked us up. You’re safe.”

 

The woman panics for a second and thrashes, which sends agony streaking up her entire right side. She knows her lord’s obsessions, and the very last place she needs to be is the home of Kylo Ren’s hero. He will come here, sooner or later. She has avoided everywhere that might be meaningful to him for an excellent reason.

 

“Nima, Nima, Nima,” Filyns soothes, stroking her forehead. She was named for the sweetness of her voice, and it pours over the woman like water. “It’s okay. It’s okay. H’shh, _eswo_.”

 

She doesn’t want to hurt these people, the woman reminds herself, she doesn’t want to hurt them, it will not help -

 

“I think she’s panicking,” Firith says. “She was the only one of the guards to survive.”

 

“We’ll take good care of her,” an unfamiliar voice says. “Miss Koyi expressed a wish to stay with her. If they get on particularly well, then maybe -”

 

Stop, the woman orders herself, feeling the air in the sickbay thicken insensibly as the Force reacts to her feelings, stop, stop it -

 

“Yes,” Firith says, “yeah, they like each other -”

 

The woman’s breathing is getting out of control, and the Force feels - warped, like she has lost her handle on her wary détente with it -

 

“Nima, hear me,” Filyns says, soft and slow. “Hear me now.”

 

The hypospray lands in her neck as a blessed relief. The woman is just calm enough to recognise the new label her fellow crewmembers have given her and wonder at it.

 

 _Nima_. It’s a very common female name on Ryloth - more so in Lessu, where Ilar and Koyi are from, than in the rougher city the woman hunted in.

 

It means ‘gift’.

 

If she’s a gift, she is not one Ilar is keen to hang on to. The Tatooinians take them to the nearest moon, and heal the woman for free, allegedly because she killed the slave-takers. The price of her care was the cost of her blood, they tell her, and it sounds like a well-worn phrase, but the woman doesn’t know enough about Tatooinian culture to identify it. Ilar removes his daughter and the rest of his crew to Tatooine proper, for repairs at Mos Espa and to lodge a formal complaint with the Law Speaker there. The woman agrees she isn’t well enough to serve as a guard on the rest of his voyage, and accepts a generous injury bonus paid out of the insurance money.

 

Ilar isn’t feeling so friendly that he allows Koyi to say goodbye, but Firith and Filyns drop in without his knowing. Which is kind of them.

 

The woman takes some time to heal. She thinks she’s going to have to pay for transport back to the Trade Spine, since she’s now lost her job, but the patrol captain who picked up Ilar’s ship has a cousin who has a sister-in-law who works in passenger shipping and needs a spare guard sharpish.

 

The woman signs on.

 

She keeps the lightsaber hidden throughout, but Tatooinians are… uncanny. They don’t know she has the Force - the woman spot-checks several minds - but they look at her like they see straight through her. It’s a quality that the woman recalls disliking in Luke Skywalker. The Naboo hide behind masks, behind makeup, behind convention, and half-truths are acceptable and expected. Tatooinians may expect half-truths, but they despise them. Under the light of the two suns, Captain Whitesun explains as the woman signs her contract, everything must be seen for what it is, or risk death. Possibly this is why the signature is being made in direct sunlight immediately before the midday rest hour.

 

Quite besides the inherent risks of being on Anakin Skywalker’s home planet, the woman isn’t sorry to be leaving.

 

She keeps going for another year. ‘Nima’ is tossed aside like any other label, though she keeps a special thought for it in a way she doesn’t for most other labels. On the next ship the woman is Cicatrice, which just means Scar. It’s got a sort of simple familiarity to it.

 

Jakku is not impossibly far away, and now, thanks to Ilar’s hush money, she has enough to get Breha off that damned planet.

 

She’s making her way steadily towards it when her latest job makes a refueling stop on a planet called Eriadu, where the Rimma Trade Route and the Hydian Way intersect. The woman gets three full standard days’ leave. Eriadu’s packed and there’s a queue for the fuel cells. And besides that, the woman’s boss says irritably, there’s some kind of unrest down on the surface. Don’t get caught up in it, Scarface, I won’t bail you out if you do.

 

The woman shrugs and goes down to the surface with her fellow crewmembers, to set her boots on some solid ground, or at least deck plating that isn’t in orbit. Eriadu isn’t short on entertainments for the rowdy and the bored, and the rest of the crew quickly lose themselves in a middling seedy district for that very purpose. The woman doesn’t follow them, though it might be fun. Her eye has been caught by a piece of graffiti, huge stark white words that reflect a curious number of hologram missing persons on the public information screens she has already passed.

 

GIVE US BACK OUR CHILDREN, it says, next to a simple stencil of a stormtrooper’s bucket helmet.

 

This time the Force does not grab her by the throat and scream. It sinks into her bones like cold water and builds her afresh in ice.

 

The woman fought alongside stormtroopers. Why did she never ask where they came from?

 

 

A riot sweeps through the entertainment district of Eriadu Space City IV seven hours later. At least fourteen spacers die, half of whom are never properly identified. When Scarface never returns to her berth, the woman’s boss assumes that she was among them.

 

The woman is busy finding and infiltrating the groups fighting the abduction of children. The Force is singing in her blood, and she never spares him another thought.

 

 

“The name’s Rilah,” a narrow-eyed Rodian says, three months in, when the woman has finally found her way past do-gooders, civilian agitators and neighbourhood watch systems to the local rebellion. The First Order doesn’t hold sway here, but the planetary government is too spineless to fight them; the organised resistance is coalescing around coils of angry parents and bereaved families. “What’s yours?”

 

“You choose,” the woman says.

 

“All right, wise guy,” Rilah snaps back, rolling xir eyes and propping xir hands on xir hips. “I hope you have the skills to back up that attitude.”

 

The woman smiles, and minds Rilah’s back throughout an extended, exceptionally dangerous, information-gathering raid. She keeps her lightsaber in its secret place, as usual, and fights exclusively with blaster and knife. She remains silent, because secrecy is what’s called for more than dramatics, and she makes a point of being efficient.

 

“Oneshot,” Rilah says, turning over a body they dragged out of the open hallway over with a foot. “That’s what I’m calling you from now on. Because you only need one shot.”

 

It’ll do, the woman thinks, then and later, when the chips full of information they stole prove that the governor is receiving a suspicious sum of credits that coincides with mass disappearances: on the twentieth of each month, a batch of children from across the overpopulated planet goes missing, and on the thirtieth, a sum appears in Governor Mehan’s private account. This explains the cooperation of the state, and Governor Mehan’s personal wealth. Eriadu and its surrounding moons have no orphanages, but they do have a capricious state foster-care system which Governor Mehan has weaponised.  Rilah lost two young sons for writing the wrong pamphlet under xir own name, and has no idea where they went.

 

Hop onto the Hydian Way, the woman tells Rilah, and it only takes a week to get to the Lostar sector, and you can do anything you like there. Building a stormtrooper academy would be nothing compared to the historical misdemeanours that sector’s hosted. The remaining three days are probably a financial lag.

 

“Either that or they’re sorting through the product,” Rilah says, xir galaxy eyes very narrow and tight at the edges. The disappearances are increasingly indiscriminate. It used to be only babies, but now it’s young children up to the age of five or six, taken without thought for gender or species or aptitudes or abilities. There must be some who won’t fit into stormtrooper armour.

 

Or that, the woman agrees, but neither of them wants to think of it that way.

 

They go their separate ways. They can come back in the morning and fight. They will come back in the morning and fight.

 

The woman has been to Lostar before, she thinks, has seen stormtroopers training there. But they were not children, and she was… different.

 

That realisation surprises her very much. She sets it aside, and tries to remember something, anything, that might be of any use. She can’t honestly say she ever took any interest in the troopers before, and now that strikes her with an emotion it takes her a while to parse. Shame, she decides, eventually. It’s shame.

 

She gets up in the morning, and she fights.

 

 

 

Somewhere in the middle of this, the woman dreams of a forest stark in black and white, and Lord Ren screaming _you need a teacher - I can show you_.

 

His only answer is a snarl from someone the woman can’t see. She wakes up laughing, and immediately feels swamped by guilt - and yet pride.

 

Why pride?

 

She meditates on it, which isn’t as hard as it was nine years ago, and several small objects go flying.

 

“I’m nailing down everything in your cubby, you fucking disaster,” Rilah sighs, and the woman doesn’t lash out at xir.

 

Several days later they hear the news of Starkiller Base - both its power and its destruction. Another ten children disappear off the streets of a city they weren’t watching closely enough and the woman almost chokes a wifebeater to death because she can and because she’s angry.

 

“Replacements,” Rilah says shortly, “they must have lost thousands on Starkiller.”

 

Xe points the woman at some more targets. “Come back when you can look at things without setting them on fire.”

 

The woman does.

 

 

 

Not so very long after Starkiller the Resistance gets out a major propaganda push. This isn’t like the hastily edited ‘war crimes, war criminals’ vid that they put out in the immediate aftermath, identifying the First Order as the organisation responsible for the total destruction of the Hosnian system. (Somewhere in the back of her mind the woman wonders about Colet and his ship, if they picked some respectable charters elsewhere, or… not.) It causes everyone in Tamé’s bunker to come to a screaming halt and converge on their one big vidscreen, where a grandfather who was a technician before he retired is linking a datapad into the relay with shaking hands. Grandad always has the best proxies and the earliest news.

 

The woman is going through katas and pretending she doesn’t have an audience - it’s nice to show off her skills freely; the aunts vouch for her, so it’s as safe to show a red lightsaber as it’s ever going to be - when a susurration runs through the gym and people rush for the door.

 

The woman assumes they are about to be under attack right up until she reaches the situation room and sees Grandad standing up, grumbling and swiping at his knees, and pressing something on a datapad. She finds Rilah, and stands at xir side.

 

“Look,” Rilah says, taking hold of her arm. “Oneshot, look.”

 

On the screen, the ember-burning glow of the Resistance’s firebird gives way to a man in a stormtrooper helmet, who takes it off immediately and shows himself to be a handsome, dark-eyed young man with brown skin and tightly curled black hair.

 

“Hi,” he says, chucking the bucket off-screen, stripping off the white gauntlets, and waving, purposefully non-threatening. “My name is Finn, and I used to be a stormtrooper.”

 

Rilah’s grip on the woman’s arm is painful. The woman looks sideways and down, and realises the Rodian is crying.

 

Finn - or FN-2187, as he was apparently known - is charismatic and shows well on screen. The importance of his appearance can’t be overestimated. Not only does he connect a solid fifty percent of the evidential dots Rilah and xir partisans have been working to line up, he provides a handsome, sentient face to the people behind the buckets. And if this ever gets into the hands of any of the troopers still in the First Order, they’ll know that he is still alive despite his defection, and that they have other options.

 

An increasingly familiar emotion sweeps over the woman. Shame, again, just as it was when she looked on the graffiti and realised she had failed to defend children who needed protection.

 

The woman accepts it. She has earned it.

 

“Do you think he’s one of ours?” a boy is whispering close by. “I mean, he could be, we’ve got loads of humans -”

 

The woman flicks him gently across the back of the head. There is a certain amount of panicked twittering from his friends, but he mostly shuts up.

 

“Shush,” says one of the aunts severely. “Oneshot isn’t going to bite you.”

 

The vid is five minutes long. Rilah’s little clan of fighters watches it three times through, picking up on every tiny detail, every clue, every hint; trying to detect an Eriadan accent in Finn’s voice. The woman can’t blame them. Everyone here but her is desperate to find a daughter, a cousin, a brother, and it would be so comforting to believe that one day, like Finn, that lost one might raise their head and throw their arms aside.

 

Rilah’s grip does not slacken. The woman’s arm is starting to go numb.

 

After the third viewing, Grandad says: “That’s enough,” and turns it off, and then they all look at Rilah.

 

Rilah’s eyes are cloudy with pain and hope. Xe blinks and they brighten, fierce as a nebula.

 

“I think it’s time we got in touch with Leia Organa,” xe says.

 

The woman’s heart does an unpleasant double-twist, and she starts to think about leaving.

 

Leia Organa is the very last person she wants to meet: it’s probably unsafe for her to do so. Quite apart from anything else, General Organa has the skills of a Jedi, and she probably knows enough of the Naboo to guess what vows the woman broke and when. She also has a solid judicial case for jailing and trying the woman for the destruction of the Temple alone, never mind the woman’s other activities over the last fifteen years. Everything the woman has heard strongly indicates that Luke Skywalker is dead, but if he’s not _,_ Leia Organa will certainly have found him, and –

 

Her lord thought he was a match for Luke Skywalker. The woman knows she isn’t.

 

Maybe it’s time that the woman moved on to find Breha. She’s so close now; Jakku is only a few weeks away, on a decent ship. And she has already done a great deal for Rilah’s group of partisans, on the promptings of the Force. Not everything she could do, and not enough to counterbalance her shame, but the woman knows nothing will ever be enough for that, and she made her promise to Breha first.

 

The Force makes her feel seasick every time she thinks about it, and she has an uneasy sense that she’s running away, but the woman insists to herself that she owes this to Breha. She can’t help the girl - woman, now, she must be nearly twenty - if she’s dead or in jail.

 

The woman still can’t quite make herself get up and leave, though.

 

Rilah can tell she’s thinking of moving on. Several months after the propaganda vid, in the aftermath of a meeting with several other cells to discuss the best way to handle the Resistance’s imminent arrival, xe takes The woman aside.

  
“I understand if you don’t want to meet a Jedi,” Rilah says. “Not a good idea when you’re carrying that red thing around, is it? I hear Skywalker’s dead, but I’m not sure I believe it - you never know with Jedi - and getting a straight answer out of that Connix woman is like getting Governor Mehan to shed a tear. Either way, there’s still the other Jedi to worry about.”

 

The Force strikes the woman sharply in the back of the head.

 

“The other Jedi?” the woman says, urgently.

 

She hasn’t spoken since yesterday morning, so Rilah looks at her oddly.

 

“Yeah,” Rilah says. “This one isn’t public knowledge. It’s just hints and whispers. But it’s all hints and whispers, and at least this comes from solid Resistance sources. They say the Resistance has a new Jedi.”

 

“What’s her name?” the woman breathes.

 

Rilah stares. “Did I say it was a female?”

 

“Rilah. Please.” The woman’s hands are twisted into knots and she is fighting not to lean forward, not to get into Rilah’s space, not to take, demand -

 

“Okay! Okay, Oneshot, easy there.” Rilah takes a breath. “Her name is Rey. That’s what I’m hearing. Some desert kid from Jakku.”

 

There’s a stinging in the woman’s eyes, a sharpness. It takes some time for her to recognise it as tears.

  
“So I take it you’re not going anywhere,” Rilah says, eyeing her with undisguised fascination.

 

The woman shakes her head and laughs. It sounds more like a bark, but she is what she is.

 

Apparently, she doesn’t need to go to Breha. Breha is coming to her.

 

 

 

The woman avoids the Resistance as much as she can. Rilah thinks this is to do with her criminal past, which is mostly true - the woman is a Darksider, and she’s not sorry; she will not abase herself or give up power she has a use for - but not completely. It’s General Organa she’s trying to avoid, and the reputation for disliking spending time with the Resistance’s fighters helps her conceal that she can hardly bring herself to spend more than an hour with Rey. After all these years of searching and fearing, the joy that encompasses the woman when she looks at the girl – safe, strong, brave, beloved, _alive_ \- is so fiercely bright that it burns: she almost cried when she saw Rey for the first time, and was completely unable to open her mouth. Rilah had to introduce her.

 

The woman is drawn to Rey, but after an hour or so in her company emotions she can hardly recognise threaten to overtake her: it’s unfamiliar and painful and the woman doesn’t know what she’s going to say or do, so she makes a lot of abrupt exits. The delegation from the Resistance gets used to it. Rilah waves it off, saying Oneshot is incredibly odd, but harmless, so long as you’re not the First Order.

 

Rey is - Rey is everything the woman hoped she would grow up to be. The woman can’t compass her relief or her delight in her two open hands. She certainly can’t speak of it, but then, the woman dispensed with words a long time ago.

 

She manages to refrain from crying again and spends as much time as she can bear teaching the girl to hold a lightsaber the right way up. She has enough raw power to face Lord Ren, and General Organa is training her; so are others, who the woman can sense, but can neither see nor identify. The woman knows there is nothing she can teach Rey of the Force that Rey cannot learn better and safer from somewhere else; the woman’s kind of power is not for people who intend on seeing a future, and she’s too selfish to share that with Rey. Whether she sees a future has long been a matter of indifference to her, but she finds herself furiously certain that Rey must do so.

 

She can’t teach Rey to use the Force to save herself, but she can certainly do something about that unsatisfactory footwork, even if she keeps having to drop the lessons suddenly and walk away, to prevent something – she doesn’t know what – from breaking. Next to the woman, Kylo Ren looked like an amateur, and Rey is going to be better than the woman. She will see to that.

 

The woman also teaches Rey’s Finn. Firstly, it is necessary that Rey should have someone to spar with, for the long hours that the woman can’t bear to spend with her. Secondly, the boy has talent and discipline and a strong spark of the Force. Thirdly, it gives her a very good excuse for seeing them together, in a setting which means she must concentrate and therefore cannot exult.

 

Finn is to Rey as the woman should have been to Ben Organa, as she was to Kylo Ren, as she meant to be. It makes her so joyful her entire chest hurts.

 

After a few days of cat-and-mouse games, General Organa catches up with the woman. Embarrassingly, it happens because the woman is watching Rey and Finn spar instead of paying attention. The woman should have heard or at least felt her coming, but she is absorbed in the sight - half the camp is, the novelty has not worn off - and General Organa’s shields are legendary.

 

The woman draws her lightsaber, but when she sees who it is she puts it away.

 

“I recognise you,” General Organa says, and the woman’s heart twists. _Traitor, coward, breaker of faith_ , she hears. “Under the scars and the grey hair and the dirty clothes. You were a close friend of - my son’s.”

 

Nobody has directly identified the woman since the day she took off from Bestine 9B without killing Minna Na’kucian. She hesitates, then nods stiffly.

 

She broke faith with Ben Organa, who became Kylo Ren. She did it for the sake of a child who might be dead, and she never went back. She betrayed her lord. She continues to betray him. She would not fight him on a field of battle, which is why she has run from him; her life is his right and she is not ready to die. But even if he welcomed her back, she could not fight for him once more. There have been too many frightened Twi’leks in cantinas, too many Togrutas crammed into cargo holds, too many human children carrying packs of drugs to spare their siblings, too many little Nautolans with half-severed tentacles. Some of that pain came only from the squalor and cruelty of the galaxy itself, but some was inflicted by Kylo Ren – Kylo Ren, and the master he serves.

 

The woman broke the vows she swore on Jakku, and General Organa doesn’t know what form that oath-breaking took, but the woman knows as surely as she knows her own skin that General Organa is aware it happened.

 

“How did you do it?” General Organa says. “How did you break away from Snoke?”

 

The woman doesn’t know how to say that it was Kylo Ren who held her fealty.

 

General Organa’s voice breaks. “Could you not have taken Ben with you?”

 

No, the woman thinks. And maybe that is a betrayal too.

 

General Organa never addresses a word to her again, and that’s fine; that is only what the woman has earned.

 

The woman goes back to watching Rey and Finn. She still hasn’t worked out how to tell Rey her name. She hasn’t said a single word that wasn’t about lightsabers since the Resistance arrived.

 

She rests her head on her hands and closes her eyes. She can feel Rey and Finn with her other senses as clearly as she can see them with her eyes. It’s like looking directly into the sun.

 

The woman stares as hard as she possibly can.

 

 

 

The woman dreams.

 

A girl in the desert, adjusting a droid. “Classified? I know all about that.”

 

A girl dressed in clean second-hand spacer clothes, sitting in the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s co-pilot’s seat, Han Solo’s hand heavy on her shoulder.

 

A girl wrenching her hand from a boy’s. “I know how to run without you holding my hand!”

 

A girl balancing herself over the raging sea under Luke Skywalker’s watchful eye.

 

A girl throwing her arms around a boy in the corridors of a First Order installation. “He said it was your idea.”

 

A girl dressed in black, at Lord Ren’s left hand; The woman herself masked but knowable standing behind them in a guard’s place.

 

A girl walking off the _Millennium Falcon_ , and walking to meet Leia Organa, who speaks not at all and says much.

 

A girl in traditional padawan’s tunic, moving through a complex kata while Tamé, differently scarred and dressed in the old Jedi robes, offers critique.

 

A girl dressed in grey at the controls of the _Millennium Falcon_.

 

A girl - no longer a girl - signing a treaty, teaching a padawan, kissing a boy, spellbound in a Gungan city, kissing a different boy, idling in Coruscant traffic, kissing a girl, fighting a battle, mending a droid, lifting a curly-haired baby onto her hip and nuzzling its cheek, grey-haired, plumper, frailer, smiling, smiling, smiling -

 

The woman dreams.

 

 

 

 

She still has no idea how to tell Rey about her past. The moment hasn’t come yet.

 

 

 

 

The offensive isn’t a simple one. That’s fine; nothing ever is. The woman waits to be told her role and accepts it. Before she leaves the command centre, Rilah hopes aloud that the Force will be with her.

 

The woman feels her eyebrows flicker. She looks at Rey. “Remember what I told you about blocking on your left side,” she says, “when Finn isn’t there to cover you.”

 

She croaks less than she used to. Her voice has been used far more than she is accustomed to, these last few weeks.

 

An hour later, she’s five hundred metres of enemy combatants away from Finn when it becomes apparent that the whole thing is an ambush, and Finn is a key target, and however much the Dameron boy tries to cover him from the air it’s not going to be enough, and Rey is too far away.

 

The woman is not too far away.

 

The calculations run through her mind like the waters of her earliest childhood, before anyone ever dressed her like a padawan from an old holo, or swore her over to Luke Skywalker’s school. There are several platoons’ worth of fighters between her and Finn, all heavily armed with blasters and blades, all battle-hardened. She can identify them from Rilah’s intel. Air support is as likely to kill her through friendly fire as save her. There is no-one who can reinforce her without compromising the ultimate objective of crushing the slave-taking trooper-building enterprise.  The terrain is unsuitable for her style of combat, and the chance that she will be shot by a sniper outside her range of Force-driven detection high.

 

Finn is irreplaceable to Rey. Finn is what the woman would have been, if she were a kinder person. Finn is Rey’s sworn strong hand, and Rey needs him to survive this war. He needs to live so that Rey will too.

 

The woman is not too far away.

 

She gestures to the team she is covering to go on without her. Their chances are high enough; she has got them past the most dangerous point.

 

She turns off her commlink and goes back for Finn.

 

 

 

When the woman opens her eyes again, she knows it is for the last time. She is too weak and in too much pain to have time left; death is pulling at her like the undertow.

 

Rilah is crying close by, fierce and furious, but it’s Finn who is holding the woman’s hand, staring into her eyes. He looks shocked.

 

 _Get Rey_ , the woman tells him without words. _Hurry_.

 

He doesn’t fetch her, he calls for her with the Force; the woman is impressed. That’s not something he could do before. His grip on her hand stays tight, and she uses it for an anchor while she waits.

 

This hurts, the woman thinks, more than anything Snoke ever did. She doesn’t pray any more, but she hopes that dying in battle is something else Rey will be spared.

 

Rey is there before the woman’s eyes slip shut again. With every remaining ounce of will the woman can lift her other hand slightly; Rey takes it and holds tight.

  
_This is all I can give you,_ she says to Rey, _this is all, and it's not enough, it was never enough, but it's something._

 

 _Oneshot_ , Rey answers, hazel eyes brightening, _don’t. Please. Let me help you._

 

The woman can feel her trying to heal the gaping wounds, but it’s not going to be enough.

 

 _Here’s another something_ , the woman says, because nothing matters now, nothing but the truth. _You were Breha._

 

Rey’s eyes widen. _What?_

 

 _Your parents didn’t leave you on Jakku._ (The woman has heard the rumours.) _They weren’t drunks. Lord Ren lied to you._

 

Rey leans forward, so close the woman can feel the Light of the Force coming off her, ozone and warmth, as fiercely bright as Luke Skywalker used to be. _Go on. Please, Oneshot._

 

 _You were brought to Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Temple. Alderaanian parents. Called you Breha. I used to call you Rey._ The woman’s breath is rattling now, and Rey’s grip is like iron, Finn’s uncertain. _You were left with the Temple because your parents didn’t know how to protect you. You survived the massacre. Ben and I wouldn’t let them kill you._

 

A wave of dizziness overcomes her, and she has to stop to fight it, because she can’t die now, she can’t, not yet -

 

_We went to Jakku. Ben had to collect something. For Snoke. He left you there. He made me think he’d killed you, to keep you safe from Snoke._

 

It’s so hard to concentrate. The world is grey and swimming but Rey’s eyes are clear and bright.

 

 _Who are you?_ Rey asks. She’s crying too, but not as loudly as Rilah.

 

It’s the least important question she could possibly ask, but it’s Rey, so she answers. _I am no-one. I was a student. I became a Knight of Ren. I betrayed my Lord and gave up my name._

 

 _I broke my vows to find you. I’m sorry I never did._ The woman thinks of the baby Ben used to rock. _I’m sorry._ She remembers the child who teethed on Luke Skywalker’s tools. _I’m sorry._ The girl whose hair she braided. _I’m sorry._ The smell of the burning dorms and the dead bodies at the Temple -

 

The images come thick and fast. The woman cannot control them; she can no longer control herself. She is dimly aware that her body is gurgling and rasping because it cannot scream.

 

 _Rey_ , she says in the end, _Rey, Rey -_

 

 _Tamé_ , Rey answers, and her eyes are squeezed closed, her cheeks wet.

 

For the first stunned moments the woman feels only confusion at the echo of a name she hasn’t heard for more than ten years. Where did Rey even find it? Buried deep in the memories she can no longer control?

_Tamé – Tamé, **thank you** -_

 

_No name - broke faith - no right -_

 

“You didn’t break faith,” Rey half-cries, and the woman is too far gone to realise she hears it with her ears, not her mind. “You kept it. With me.”

 

Nothing is silent, but for Tamé, for one second, it feels like the whole galaxy holds still.

 

 _Oh_ , Tamé thinks, that last breath of realisation, a decade of her life slotting back into place like the last piece of a lightsaber. Her mouth twitches as if she’s trying to say something, and Rey bends closer to hear it, but there’s nothing there except a last exhale.

 

Tamé dies with her own name on her lips.

 

***

 

A few years later, a tallish woman in a grey tunic and a brown leather jacket with a lightsaber on one hip walks into a municipal office on a small planet in the Chandrilan system.

 

“I need to reactivate the identity code for a missing person,” she says. “I have my ID and gene print. And I need to register a death under wartime conditions.” She passes over a datachip.

 

“What name for the death?” says the one available clerk, who is no longer bored.

 

“Tamé,” Breha Durane Horada replies. “Tamé Zapalo.”

 


End file.
